Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of important and confidential information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Traditional maintenance and management of accesses to file system related information (e.g., inodes, etc.) can also often involve considerable utilization or “consumption” of system resources.
Traditional approaches to information storage often involve file systems that define how information is stored in various storage media. Many file systems utilize data structures to track information associated with a file. One exemplary data structure that file systems often use is an inode. An inode is typically entered in an inode cache when an activity or operation involves a file related information. Conventional processing systems usually include a variety of operations that involve accessing files associated with inodes and many of the operations (e.g., find file, list files (ls), etc.) involve accessing numerous files. For example, in a large file system with millions of files, a find file operation can involve accessing millions of the files and corresponding conventional entry of numerous inodes in the inode cache. Maintaining large inode caches can result in a number of adverse impacts (e.g., inode cache bloating, slowed responsiveness, extensive inode cleanup overhead, system hangs, etc.) that affect system resources and performance.